I have a special interest in general practice and have over 10 years' experience working as a pharmacist independent prescriber (part-time) in the areas of hypertension, type 2 diabetes and medication review of elderly patients in residential care.  Prior to working in the School of Pharmacy, previous posts have included:

• I was a Prescribing Adviser to GPs at the Health and Social Care Board. This included visiting GPs and providing feedback on their prescribing patterns via e.g. COMPASS reports.  The role also involved educating GPs on the safe and effective use of medicines and the implementation of prescribing guideline (such as NICE) into practice.
• I provided a Medicines Governance Role to GP practices and community pharmacies within the Belfast Local Commissioning Group area.  This included overseeing the management of prescribing errors in all GP practices and the management of dispensing incidents in community pharmacies in the Belfast area. My priority role was to ensure that systems were put in place to prevent re-occurrence of serious incidents and that any learning was shared throughout practitioners in Northern Ireland. I was the lead pharmacist for establishing an anonymous adverse incident reporting and learning system for community pharmacists across Northern Ireland.  Our team disseminated the learning on these incidents to all community pharmacists in NI through the Medicines Safety Matters Newsletters.  I have been principal investigator of Serious Adverse Incidents reported to the HSCB.
• I was Prescribing Information Pharmacist at the Regional Prescribing Information Unit, Department of Therapeutics and Pharmacology, QUB where I was involved in the development of COMPASS reports and instigated the COMPASS Therapeutic notes series.  I was also part of a team that wrote the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Northern Ireland Formulary.  I conducted research around drug utilisation, patient compliance and hypertension.  

My research focus at Queen’s University includes Pharmacist Independent Prescribing, clinical skills, preparing pharmacists to work in primary care, the role of simulation and the effectiveness of e-learning in pharmacy education.  I continue to have an interest in hypertension through my prescribing role in general practice and scholarly activites including advising pharmacist independent prescribers on running hypertension clinics.

I am manager and programme lead for the recently GPhC-accredited Pharmacist Independent Prescribing Programme at the School of Pharmacy, QUB.  I teach clinical skills to both undergraduate pharmacy students and to pharmacists undertaking the Independent Prescribing qualification. 

My role also involves teaching MPharm students in areas that are relevant to primary care e.g. safe prescribing systems, prescribing analysis, antimicrobial stewardship, formularies, medicines optimisation and evidence-based prescribing. I teach across a wide range of topics within the MPharm degree including practising to be a pharmacist, calculations and pharmacokinetics (interprofessional learning with medical students), consultation and communication skills.  

I write and update the module on Evidence-based Practice within the cert/dip/MSc in Advanced Clinical Pharmacy Practice and am an examiner on the Advanced Therapeutics modules.

I am the SIM champion for the School of Pharmacy and am involved in planning the teaching which will occur in interSim - the new simulation centre at QUB.  Priority areas for teaching will include interprofessional learning, medicines safety, clinical skills and communicating with patients and other healthcare professionals.

External to pharmacy teaching, I also teach medical and biology students on The Evidence Based Management of Type 2 Diabetes in the module Principles of Pharmacology and Therapeutics for the BSc in Human Biology and intercalated BSc in Medical Science at Queen’s University Belfast.